Last update Fri Sep 19 02:21:26 PDT 2008

This has been an all-time consuming project for the last couple months ( as of Mar 2008 ).

Some people seem to question my sanity for making it, but it works exactly like I intended! Several people have made rude comments about bulk storage of keyboards. Whatever. These are all cabled up. Anything that doesn't have Midi is at a playable level, the keyboards near to the bottom all have excellent ( for the 80's ) Midi implementations so I rarely have to do more then turn them on to use them. I've been in way too many studios where half the equipment was leaning against a wall or had empty beverage cans sitting on them. Go back to using your VST synth plug-in and I'll go my own way trying to cause California's next series of brown-outs.

The timeline : Cut out the major wood components over Thanksgiving 2007. House mate came back from vacation so I couldn't use the entire garage until she moved out late December, so I started working in ernest early January. It was fairly quick to assemble ( couple weekends ) but a total PITA to paint. I wanted to just stain, but I had to do too much putty and stuff to hide the edges of the plywood and all that. I finally wound up using Latex floor paint because of its hardness. Yes, I really did choose that "Sunshine Orange" colour. Most everything else inside is dark and I wanted something to brighten the place up a bit.

Each drawer is 47"x24" and covered with ribbed vinyl sheet. Mounted on 24" ball bearing drawer sliders.

The intention was not to make every keyboard 100% comfortably accessible. Synth's that are rarely used are further top/bottom from Center with players located more towards the middle. The DSS1 has the place of honor at the bottom to provide ballast.

A cost is hard to estimate. I bought a lot of new tools that I wanted so they don't really count. Wood-wise and hardware, perhaps $500.

Oh, in case it isn't readily obvious, the cab is a tad over 6' tall and about 300lbs unloaded. Internally its fully wired for power. The top shelf holds a midi interface and patch bay back to the mixer. The old Boss mixer you may notice is no longer there and I've juggled a few of the synth's around, moving the Polysix and replacing it with a Prodigy and SH09.

Finally inside and loaded. Closed view.
OB-x partially out, Omni2 fully out.
Front view.
Cell phone picture in the garage.
Cell phone picture in the garage with drawer open.

After making this I became quite enamored with using sliders to get keyboards out of the way as needed. If you take several of the ball bearing slides and put them on their sides, they can support about 30% of their rated weight. Two flat pieces of plywood sandwiching the slides works fine to gain access to keyboards tucked into shelving, thus I've been able to switch to cheap costco bread racks to hold a lot of equipment while still getting ready access to my controller keyboards. A nice benefit of course being you are less likely to drop that rubber mallet on your Minimoog if it has something over it protecting it, and no, the Mini isn't on sliders, I gave it plenty of room to be usable as for over 25 years now its been the synth that I poke at for fun.

If you have any questions/comments you can find me on the Synth-DIY list, or you can email me xyzzy@sysabend.org or xyzzy@sdiy.org ( all my email addresses go to the same place so it really doesn't matter )

Yeah, I'm the guy that runs sdiy.org and yet didn't bother to put up a page on it for 2 years...